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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Race, penis size, and pseudoscience

A forthcoming paper's claims about racial differences in penis size are unfounded.

A soon to be publishedstudyby Richard Lynn claims to have found scientific evidence that there are substantial differences in the average penis length of men from different races. These claims are in line with vulgar racial stereotypes and are part of a larger research agenda based on a belief in ‘race realism’. Advocates of race realism argue that there are real and pervasive differences between racial groups in personality, intelligence and social behaviour, that these differences have a genetic and evolutionary origin and that they can explain disparities in important social and economic outcomes between races. Lynn’s theories about race rest on shaky foundations and the data sources he uses as evidence for his claims about penis sizes are untrustworthy. For these reasons, his claims should be disregarded as unscientific.

World map of penis sizes - looks impressive, but where did this information come from?

Lynn’s (2012) proposal is based
on the theories of the late J. Philippe Rushton. As noted in aprevious article, Rushton, a notorious advocate of race realism, proposed
that the major races can be sorted into a human hierarchy based on their
supposed reproductive strategies. According to Rushton’s r-K life history
theory, there are two main reproductive strategies forming ends of a continuum.
The r-strategy involves large numbers of offspring with minimal investment,
whereas the K-strategy involves fewer offspring and greater investment.
According to Rushton, Africans are the most r-selected whereas Asians are the
most K-selected, and Europeans are somewhere in between, although closer to
Asians than Africans. Rushton claimed that these two reproductive strategies
were associated with a whole suite of mental and physical characteristics
including brain size, intelligence, criminality, and of course penis length.
According to this theory, African men have the smallest brains and the largest
penises, whereas Asian men are the opposite. This has been described as a ‘Goldilocks’theory of race, in which European men are
‘just right’ having a combination of high intelligence and a reasonable genital
endowment.

Rushton responded to criticisms
of his racist theories by arguing that scientific theories should be judged on
the merits of their evidence. Unfortunately for him, it is on scientific
grounds that his theories fall apart (Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, &
Ziegler, 1990). Weizmann et al. have argued that Rushton’s assignment of
particular traits to either r or K strategies is completely arbitrary. He
claims that the K strategy promotes altruism and cooperative behaviour, whereas
the r strategy promotes inter-male aggression and criminality. However,
according to biological models K strategies appear under conditions of intense
competition for limited resources and so there is no reason to associate K with
altruism or r with criminality. Additionally, the original theory predicts
that unstable fluctuating environments would favour r-strategies, whereas
stable, predictable environments would favour K strategies. Hot topical
environments have higher levels of stability than colder ones. Therefore,
according to this theory Africans, who developed in tropical environment,
should be highly K-selected, contrary to Rushton’s theory.

Rushton’s theory has also
been criticised for naïveté about sexual matters (Weizmann, et al., 1990). He
assumed that larger genital size means less sexual restraint, more frequent
intercourse and therefore more frequent procreation. These assumptions are
unjustified as humans regularly engage in non-procreative sexual activity.
Furthermore, sexual mores within a society can change within a generation from
prudishness to permissiveness and back again. Rushton’s theory assumes that
sexual interests are genetically based, yet genes cannot substantially change
within a generation. Rushton and Bogaert (1987) argued that blacks are more
sexually precocious and less sexually restrained than whites, based on Kinsey’s
out-dated and non-representative data. However, they ignore information from
the same source that contradicted their theory, such as that blacks were more
prudish than whites about nudity, and that blacks were less likely to have a
prostitute as a first sexual partner. Kinsey also found that whites engage
in more non-coital sexual behaviour, such as oral-genital contact, than Blacks.
Rushton interprets this as indicating that Whites are less reproductively
oriented (hence more K-selected) even though this contradicts his argument that
K-strategies are associated with greater sexual restraint an presumably less
sexual activity in general (Weizmann, et al., 1990).

Rushton assumes that because
K-strategies are less reproductively oriented, members of the K-selected races
should have fewer children. However, fertility is sensitive to environmental
and social conditions (Weizmann, et al., 1990). In colonial times, North
America experienced historically high rates of fertility, yet in modern times
fertility in North America has declined to the low rates seen in modern
European countries. Furthermore, Chinese peoples have historically had very
high rates of fertility, in spite of being highly K-selected according to
Rushton.

Lynn attempts to justify
his belief that there are differences between races in penis length on the
basis that European and Asian males have lower levels of testosterone than
Africans and that the “reduction of testosterone had the effect of
reducing penis length, for which evidence is given by Widodsky and Greene
(1940).” Widodsky and Greene (1940) is actually a study of the effects of sex
hormones on the penises of rats. This is hardly convincing evidence that there
are racial differences in testosterone levels or that a reduction in penis
length ever occurred in human history.

Lynn's claims about differences
in penis length between races build on earlier claims by Rushton and Bogaert
(1987). The Rushton and Boagert paper is striking for its use of non-scholarly
sources (Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, & Ziegler, 1991). These include a
book of semi-pornographic “tall tales” by an anonymous nineteenth century
French surgeon that makes wildly inconsistent claims about genital sizes in
people of different races. Lynn also refers to this book without mentioning any
problems with this as a source of information. Another odd data source cited by
Rushton and Bogaert is an article authored by a certain “P. Nobile” published
inForum: International
Journal of Human Relations.This
publication is better known to the public as “The Penthouse Forum”, a popular
men’s magazine.

The data sources that Lynn uses
in his recent paper are hardly much better. One of them is a book by Donald
Templer (another self-professed race realist[1]) calledIs Size Important?Templer is not a urologist but a
psychologist so why he would claim to be an authority on this subject is
unclear.[2]Lynn’s
other source is the world penis sizewebsite. These are both self-published sources that have not been
independently verified. A blogger namedEthnic Musehas
carefully examined this site’s references and found that a number of articles
listed on the site either do not exist under the name given or do not discuss
penis size at all. There are also numerous discrepancies between the values
provided by the website and the actual values given by the references.[3]Therefore, the information on this
website cannot be trusted and no conclusions should be drawn from it.

Lynn’s paper was an attempt to
validate one of the claims of Rushton’s r-K theory that there are predictable
differences between races in a range of physical and psychological
characteristics, including penis length. However, this theory is unscientific
and makes arbitrary claims, many of which have been refuted in considerable
detail (Weizmann, et al., 1990, 1991). Furthermore, Lynn did not consult
authoritative sources for his paper, such as urologists or urology journals.
The data sources he did use for his paper are untrustworthy and therefore his
results, like his theory, should not be taken seriously.[4]The very relevance of penis length to
understanding whatever racial differences may exist would seem to be highly
doubtful.

Notes

[1] Among other things,
Templer apparently advocates the voluntary sterilisation of
welfare recipients on eugenics grounds.

[3] I can confirm this. One
of thereferencescited is titled “Male penis length average
in sub-Saharan Africa, circumcision and relation to AIDS: a review” and
supposedly appeared in the journal AIDS and Behavior in
2007. I searched this journal and no article by this name could be found.

[4] Apaperby Tatu Westling makes the
ludicrous claim that a country’s economic growth is inversely
correlated with penis size based on data from this website.

Free Rice

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About Me

Psychology graduate with boundless curiosity. I blog on Psychology Today about a range of subjects that interest me. I have a particular interest in personality and intelligence. Scientific controversies are best approached with a level head and a regard for truth over politics or ideology in my view.